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Monday, October 21, 2024 6:09:35 PM
Confirmation: JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
"Follow the entire thread. #Crazy#Sick"
Robert Reich
Rightwing tech lords are betting that Vance will be the Republican presidential pick in 2028. They’re probably right
Thu 3 Oct 2024 20.00 AEST
‘Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election.’ Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images
JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.
But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?
Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?
In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.]
Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.
In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”
In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.
In contrast to Trump ... Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging
leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/16/buffalo-massacre-great-replacement-theory-republicans .. voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.
Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.
Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.
Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
----------
[Insert: So there you have it, Vance is young, the tech moguls have long-term plans. NOTE: No Libertarian party has ever won an election to lead any country of the world, so one decades in the making solution of these tech oligarchs appears to be to not only eliminate elections, but also to eliminate countries. See:
OUCH, new to me -- ‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening
"Here ya go, Hap. Listen to him say it:"
Jason Wilson
Argument for a ‘red Caesar’ to rule US may seem esoteric but conservative thinktank behind idea has connections to Trump
[...]In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.
P - Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.
P - In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
P - Biden warns voters a second Trump presidency will threaten democracy
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/biden-campaign-democracy-trump-presidency
[...] ...Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted he was not making claims of fraud because he had no evidence of fraud. Trafficking in allegations and theories that will clearly not prevail in courts of law, the strategy is to manufacture the appearance of electoral chaos, which then provides cover for at least three Republican controlled legislatures in the battleground states to appoint presidential electors for Trump. It won’t work given President-elect Biden’s clear wins in several battleground states, but it may well provide a blueprint for those who would undo the results of a close election in the future.
[...]Nothing in the Constitution justifies substituting the clear choice of the voters as determined by the various state laws with the choice of the state legislatures. Such a move is at odds with state and federal election law. So, too, is the pressure President Trump and his allies are placing on Republican officials to actively alter the election results.
[...]The Republican Party is disowning the American experiment in democratic self-government. And they are empowering the illiberal elements in the Republican Party and conservative circles who are all too willing, in defending Trump, to dispense with the American Constitution. Trump’s tawdry intellectuals started down this path within days of the election. They’ve called for violence in the streets to bring this about. It’s all justified because the alternative—a Biden presidency like the possibility of a Clinton presidency—will, somehow, end America. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172365111
The 1776 Report
"NOTE to EVERYONE!!
This is a dangerous site and individual, ://1776project.org/1776-projects-underway-1
and I'm afraid numerous members on that site have infiltrated this website..."
[...]* Charles R. Kesler, professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and conservative book reviewer
*Charlie Kirk, co-founder and director of Turning Point USA
[Insert: PragerUf'ing kidding? PRAGERU’S INFLUENCE
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174814060
... and ...
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
[...]Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
P - “The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote .. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our/ .. in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
P - Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175169069]
----------
JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense
Moira Donegan
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/02/jd-vance-debate-performance
Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.
Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/03/jd-vance-anti-democracy-movement-leader
"Follow the entire thread. #Crazy#Sick"
Robert Reich
Rightwing tech lords are betting that Vance will be the Republican presidential pick in 2028. They’re probably right
Thu 3 Oct 2024 20.00 AEST
‘Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election.’ Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images
JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.
But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?
Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?
In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.]
Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.
In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”
In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.
In contrast to Trump ... Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging
leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/16/buffalo-massacre-great-replacement-theory-republicans .. voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”
In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.
Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.
Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.
Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”
Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.
----------
[Insert: So there you have it, Vance is young, the tech moguls have long-term plans. NOTE: No Libertarian party has ever won an election to lead any country of the world, so one decades in the making solution of these tech oligarchs appears to be to not only eliminate elections, but also to eliminate countries. See:
OUCH, new to me -- ‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening
"Here ya go, Hap. Listen to him say it:"
Jason Wilson
Argument for a ‘red Caesar’ to rule US may seem esoteric but conservative thinktank behind idea has connections to Trump
[...]In June, the rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.
P - Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.
P - In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
P - Biden warns voters a second Trump presidency will threaten democracy
Read more > https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/28/biden-campaign-democracy-trump-presidency
[...] ...Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted he was not making claims of fraud because he had no evidence of fraud. Trafficking in allegations and theories that will clearly not prevail in courts of law, the strategy is to manufacture the appearance of electoral chaos, which then provides cover for at least three Republican controlled legislatures in the battleground states to appoint presidential electors for Trump. It won’t work given President-elect Biden’s clear wins in several battleground states, but it may well provide a blueprint for those who would undo the results of a close election in the future.
[...]Nothing in the Constitution justifies substituting the clear choice of the voters as determined by the various state laws with the choice of the state legislatures. Such a move is at odds with state and federal election law. So, too, is the pressure President Trump and his allies are placing on Republican officials to actively alter the election results.
[...]The Republican Party is disowning the American experiment in democratic self-government. And they are empowering the illiberal elements in the Republican Party and conservative circles who are all too willing, in defending Trump, to dispense with the American Constitution. Trump’s tawdry intellectuals started down this path within days of the election. They’ve called for violence in the streets to bring this about. It’s all justified because the alternative—a Biden presidency like the possibility of a Clinton presidency—will, somehow, end America. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172365111
The 1776 Report
"NOTE to EVERYONE!!
This is a dangerous site and individual, ://1776project.org/1776-projects-underway-1
and I'm afraid numerous members on that site have infiltrated this website..."
[...]* Charles R. Kesler, professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and conservative book reviewer
*Charlie Kirk, co-founder and director of Turning Point USA
[Insert: PragerUf'ing kidding? PRAGERU’S INFLUENCE
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174814060
... and ...
Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
[...]Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
P - “The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote .. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our/ .. in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
P - Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175169069]
----------
JD Vance’s debate lines were so polished you could forget they made no sense
Moira Donegan
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/02/jd-vance-debate-performance
Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful; they should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.
Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/03/jd-vance-anti-democracy-movement-leader
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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